Fuck the Cloud (2009)

> You are misunderstanding me( I know sit seems to be a common pattern for you)

Then maybe you should write a bit more clearly. The opening line of this whole thread is you quoting a single line out of context, stating you disagree with it, then providing evidence that you probably should agree with it and that in fact you act contrary to your stated position. To me that makes no sense at all.

> whether I stand behind what I say is totally separate concept from your motivations and how they reflect on you as a person.

That's another thing I can't make sense of. Probably my fault.

> The quality of my technical reputation is not in question here and my employer is welcome to read this thread.

Excellent.

> I didn't call you an "alarmist" I said worrying about whether amazon will stay in business, "get hacked", or if S3 is going to disappear without warning is "alarmism"

I never suggested Amazon would go out of business, you made that up all by your lonesome. What I wrote is that your control panel could get hacked which is an entirely different thing.

I never suggested S3 would disappear.

I also never suggested that Amazon (the company) would get hacked.

Even so, there is a remote possibility that all of the above (which you just came up with) would become true at some point in the future. But I purposefully did not allude to any of those because the chances of those happening are remote enough that for me they don't count as reasons to have a back-up.

> They were responsible for 39% of all commercial internet transactions last year

Who cares.

> and store 2,000,000,000,000 objects.

Doesn't enter into the equation at all.

> If they go under we are are all in a heap of trouble.

Well, you probably will be.

> A NAS device in some remote part of the netherlands isn't going to save us.

NL is small enough that we don't really have remote parts. Besides, none of those situations are the ones that I wrote about in my original comment. You really have a hard time in the understanding department, first with the original posting, subsequently with my comment on yours and further on with several other people in this thread.

When you feel everybody is acting weird or seems to be unable to understand what you are saying: consider the problem is at least partially on your own end.

I believe the word you're looking for is "insurance" :P

Stuck in the groove of statistics? When talking about risk managment? Where is my jackie chan rage face image.http://mylolface.com/assets/faces/misc-jackie-chan.jpg

Gain more experience in IT? I mean i've been at it professionally for 18 years soooo I guess it depends on what you consider "a lot of experience"

I get what you are saying. "A disgruntled amazon employee could just delete the world's data" right? Except for thats not the case. Its all stored in triplicate(at a minimum) across a vast number of independently available data centers. The durability guarantees are hard to fathom . Honestly I bet they'd have a hard time deleting data permanently even if they wanted to.

But once against I'm not advocating that you only store your data in one place. I'm just saying dollars to donuts you stored at least one copy of your data on s3, catastrophe has struck and only one copy of your data is left where do you think it is?

I know where I am placing my bets.

In all fairness, you need more than just off-cloud backups to guard against a single pissed off employee (make sure you're locking S3 and your local backups with different credentials, and the credentials to read the backups can't be gleaned from the credentials that write them) or a single fat-fingered command (kingdomofloathing.com once blew away N days of user progress by accidentally running a backup script in the "restore" direction against prod data).

> Gain more experience in IT? I mean i've been at it professionally for 18 years soooo I guess it depends on what you consider "a lot of experience"

Experience is not measured in years but in what you learned in those years.

> I get what you are saying. "A disgruntled amazon employee could just delete the world's data" right?

No, that's not what I was saying. It is absolutely incredible but you again manage to mis-interpret what I wrote. Really, how hard can this be, let me try once again:

An employee of a customer of Amazon could wipe the company data.

So if you 'x' found a company 'y' that employs an employee ('z') then 'z' can if given the right credentials do a ton of harm to your company. Note that the amazon employees are not even in this equation (they probably should be but they are a lesser threat assuming Amazon is set up properly).

> Except for thats not the case. Its all stored in triplicate(at a minimum) across a vast number of independently available data centers.

You really should read up on codespaces.

> The durability guarantees are hard to fathom .

Yes, except when your data is gone. Then the durability guarantees matter not one single bit. Amazon can not protect against you or one of your employees wiping the data purposefully.

Directly from the Amazon docs:

"When an object is deleted from Amazon S3, removal of the mapping from the public name to the object starts immediately, and is generally processed across the distributed system within several seconds. Once the mapping is removed, there is no external access to the deleted object. That storage area is then made available only for write operations and the data is overwritten by newly stored data."

> Honestly I bet they'd have a hard time deleting data permanently even if they wanted to.

Apparently, you're wrong about that. And it is quite logical from Amazons perspective that you are wrong about that. Otherwise how would their billing ever function. If you delete something there may be a very short period during which Amazon might be able to recover it if you asked nicely however I wouldn't count and that depending on how important the data is you're playing Russian Roulette here. And if you're so sure the data can be recovered how come you directly contradict Amazon documentation on that very subject?

Glacier is another matter by the way, at least there you'll be writing some code to delete a vault.

> But once against I'm not advocating that you only store your data in one place. I'm just saying dollars to donuts you stored at least one copy of your data on s3, catastrophe has struck and only one copy of your data is left where do you think it is?

Yes, well, several instances that prove you wrong exist. Your next hire might prove you personally wrong.

Good to see you at least have a copy elsewhere, and nice to see you consider at least a possibility besides the technical ones.

> I know where I am placing my bets.

You're welcome to place your own bets any way you want. But the company you work for and the companies you found had better have a 'oh shit we lost all our Amazon data' recovery plan in the vault and it had better be one that when tested holds water. Otherwise you too may one day start looking to outsource your troubles.

Mind you, I don't actually have a problem with people that act in this way, they are more than happy to pay me my exorbitant fees when it comes to saving their hospital or company or whatever institution it is this week that manages to intersect paths with something they considered absolutely impossible right up until the moment that it happened.

But you at least will never ever be able to say you weren't warned.